Posts from 16 January 2015

Spent most of the day today trying to make up for lost time, which doesn't really work but most of the day I had that level of speed. I left the office at 11:00 last night and midnight tonight, and got in a half-hour late this morning because there just isn't enough time.

A benefit to overthinking everything and going down blind alleys is that my bug-hunting skills are only getting better. After three productive hours prior to lunch doing… I barely remember, but something… I tried doing something a bit too clever (having to do with separation of concerns again), and didn't come up for air until after 6. From 6 to midnight I was plenty productive, but messing up like that still stings.

In brief: I monkey-patched the Backbone Router prototype to offer callbacks before and after routing, and then tried using those hooks to grab a user who wasn't logged in and redirect them to the login page (while preserving state). Once again, on my way home, I think I understand what I was doing wrong, and can see how to fix it, but I ended up ripping most of that code out and leaving it basically exactly how we were taught in the auth demo.

I still don't like having a currentUser global, but for my app it's not a terrible idea, since you need to have some purpose coming to a blackboard-like site. It's not like your typical modern website, where there's generally some functionality that's meaningful even without an account, so… whatever.

Oh, so I remember now—one of the fastest ways to make me hate your website or app is to have data entry be painful. So I spent three hours making syllabus creation absolutely beautiful, modulo a couple tweaks, and ran into a bug that I couldn't figure out even with Tommy's help. Basically, I had the event creation success callback call a JQuery focus() event on the first field in the form, and it kept losing focus after render. So I said to hell with it, and installed a setTimeout call that waits 50ms then focuses back on the first field. Hacky, but resilient.

No matter what I do, more of these sorts of hacks creep into my codebase. But then I see things like when iOS autocompletes a word, then you press punctuation, it backspaces and writes the punctuation and a space instead of just inserting it at the previous position.

I can't decide if this says more about the UX rot of iOS or the inevitability of hacky solutions.

Tomorrow we're presenting again and I think I'm going to bum rush the core features, no matter how they look, rather than polish anything. I have a TODO.md full of broken things, but that's just going to be the nature of the beast.

Wanna know what kind of day it's been? I just remembered that I didn't eat my breakfast. I packed it in my bag 16 hours ago.